FiftySix Lives And A Pair Of Tweezers
by Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod
Summary: Damn it, Nyota hates it when Gaila borrows her stuff, but this time she can't be mad.


**A/N:** Second Star Trek fic ever... and I'm still clueless. Apologies in advance for any terrible breaches of canon! Please read and review.

**Disclaimer: **I own nothing, I just write, and I make no profit.

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The first time Nyota sees Gaila again after the massacre involving the Narada and about seven Starfleet ships, Gaila is standing by the huge window in the hospital common-room. She is not wearing uniform, but a soft primrose-yellow shift dress that gets about halfway down her thighs and stops and lace-patterned black leggings that fail to reach her knees. Her glorious red hair has been cut short, at first because it had to be and then because Gaila wasn't willing to go out in public with the ugly but necessary quick cut by a medical intern to remove singed and blackened patches. There are pale scars on her bare arms and legs, the stripes and sparks of electrical burns that would have killed her if she was human.

Nyota spares a moment to thank any god out there that her roommate, while vastly irritating and prone to stealing her black nailpolish, is not human and is therefore still alive.

She's standing there at the window, looking at something in her hand which Nyota can't see, turning it over and over in delicate fingers; she's perceptibly thinner and weaker, but she will be strong again, Nyota promises herself, promises Gaila who sleeps with anyone she feels like and smiles all the time and never, ever talks about her past. Quietly, Nyota hopes that the horror of the _Farragut_'s demise didn't break Gaila's mind, didn't wound her where years of slavery couldn't. Some people say that Orion slave women enjoy themselves, but looking at Gaila's eyes, looking at the constant awareness of everyone's position relative to her, Nyota is pretty damn sure that Gaila wasn't among them, that she didn't like being used. Casual sex is fine; being a toy is not. This is a rule by which Gaila lives her life, or Nyota thinks it is.

Possibly this is why Spock told her she displayed exceptional aural sensitivity; if you want to guess even the tiniest bit about Gaila Vro, you have to listen when she isn't talking and hear what she doesn't say. Nyota picks on that random god again, but not for thanks this time; for a prayer that Gaila will not have stopped talking without uttering a word, that she will not become a cool ceramic blankness that even Nyota cannot listen to and translate.

All this passes through Nyota's head as she crosses the common-room, ignoring the chatter of residents. Dealing with Kirk as her captain (_oh_ dear _god_ her _captain_) has taught her to think very fast and remove the button that says DO NOT PUSH from his grasp before he even knows it's there.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Her head is becoming cluttered, which is a stress reaction to not knowing if Gaila's all right in the head, or maybe it's fear that she isn't. With an effort, Nyota clears it just as Gaila turns to her, blue eyes full of sadness – and cruelly that makes Nyota happy because they aren't blank and that means that Gaila is still in there – and holds out to Nyota on her flat palm the thing she was toying with earlier.

It's a pair of tweezers. Stainless steel, with pink rubber grips which are a bit melted, the steel a bit battered.

Nyota's mind goes totally blank and her jaw drops and this is why Nyota hates Gaila sometimes, because _she hadn't even noticed they were missing_. Gaila's personal code of conduct apparently does not include 'thou shalt not steal your roommate's nailpolish, moisturiser, eyeliner, or anything else, and thou shalt especially not steal her clean panties just because thou forgot to do thine own damn washing, Gaila, I'm serious!' and ever since they've roomed together at the Academy, little things of Nyota's have vanished. Of course, they come back, usually in mint condition and sometimes before. The panties were clean when Nyota got them back, forty minutes after she'd noticed they were missing.

But they were still _Nyota's goddamn panties_ and these are _Nyota's goddamn tweezers_ and, fuck it, sometimes Gaila is a real pain in the ass.

"Your tweezers saved my life," Gaila says, in all seriousness. "They saved fifty-six people."

Nyota forgets to be pissed and just gapes at her. "Gaila, what-?"

Gaila shuts her eyes and her jaw twitches as she tries not to clench it and speaks and doesn't quite explain, but this is okay, as Nyota's Gaila-interpretation skills have not gotten too rusty in the week or so they've been apart. Nyota hears what Gaila says and doesn't say and her imagination matches it up with the fragments of ship, the tiny matchstick figure that might have been a human body, the metal ripped like paper and floating in space that she saw from the bridge of the _Enterprise_.

_nobody here knows what's going on because does it look like we're on the bridge this is engineering and we're dying dying dying as weapons we don't understand tear open the hull and pour fire down our walkways and into our engines and gaila's another pair of hands boosting the cooling systems and filling holes with sealant, a flash of red hair and green skin and a ripped stained burned uniform but she ignores the pain because she can, breathes as best she can and tries to cope with the shifting pressure inside the ship, stumbles and falls and picks herself up again as the Farragut lurches, and _baby baby no_ the chief engineer whispers with tears on his face because half his engineers are dead and his beautiful ship is dying. He hits the commands to seal off and shield the section of the ship with its own life support systems (gaila thinks automatically medical bay mess auxiliary power source) and gaila cries to him, _what, what are you doing_, and he turns to her and he screams _saving lives, saving lives, go and take the others with you and save what you fucking well can cadet because that's all you can do in this life_: or that's what he meant to scream but there's no time and all that makes it out of his mouth is _run_ before metal shrapnel pierces his eyes and peppers his brain and there's blood in his mouth and he's dead._

_smoke, fire, sparks. gaila runs, calls to the others, dives and rolls under the closing steel door with seconds to spare and discovers that nobody followed her. well they can call her a coward if they like but screens are telling her that not all the doors closed because the automatic circuits are broken and screams are telling her that medical bay has more patients than doctors and she should finish her commanding officer's last actions for him it's all the tribute she can give him and it will save lives. gaila doesn't hesitate she takes her electronic screwdriver out of her belt and rips open the panels with it and her bare hands, fumbles trying to route power to the override circuits but her fingers are too clumsy and she fears to break the wires, she pats down her pockets and toolbelt panickily and there it is there is her salvation there are the tweezers she meant to give back to nyota and nyota's going to be pissed but there's no time to think about that, no time, no time._

"Smoke," Gaila says slowly, remembering. "Smoke, fire, sparks..."

Nyota's eyes are stricken, and she is full of guilt that Kirk's weird combination of certifiable crazy and utter brilliance meant that she was spared while Gaila suffered. She doesn't even care about the tweezers any more.

Gaila blinks again and there's a new alertness in her eyes. She clears her throat and pushes the tweezers gently towards Nyota. "So. I'm sorry I took your tweezers. Do you want them back? They're kind of burnt. Should I buy you new ones?"

"No," Nyota says, "no," and she's shaking her head and crying as she folds Gaila's hands over the tweezers and puts her arms around the other woman, feeling Gaila stiffen with surprise and rubbing her hand over the other woman's shoulderblades and rocking her. "No, no. I'm not mad, Gaila, I'm not. I swear I'm not. Come back to Starfleet and bring the tweezers and save more lives. Oh God Gaila, oh _God_, I'm so sorry-"

Gaila's arms fold around her too, with the tweezers clutched in one fist. "It's okay, Nyota, it's all right. I'm fine, I promise. I'm fine."

Maybe it's inappropriate that it occurs to the both of them that this is the first time Gaila has nicked something and Nyota has not been mad, or maybe it's just Nyota and Gaila and that's the way they are, tweezers and all.


End file.
